Abstract:

In 1605, Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, a playful metafictional novel that engaged the reader with questions of authorship and the relationship between reality and fiction. Over three hundred years later, Jorge Luis Borges would write many short stories that would dig into and expand on these questions, such as "Borges y yo" and "Pierre Menard, autor del Quixote". Borges’ stories take Cervantes’ playful ideas and push them into the unsettling, raising questions about an author’s relationship to their own text but also how identity is formed—or fractured—through writing. A few decades later, Paul Auster wrote City of Glass, a bizarre novel that tracks a mysterious set of circumstances that lead Daniel Quinn, the protagonist, into an exhaustive investigation and philosophical introspection—it revolves around books, writing, reading, and the uncertainty of the line between madness and creativity, between the real and the imaginary. All three of these authors play with the conventions of narration and engage the reader in a very active way—ultimately leading the reader to hold all the power in constructing meaning from the works.